


Balance and The Force

by ElsieMcClay



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon ship, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Nightmares, Set during the Original Trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, The Force, The Force Is Kind Of A Bitch, Vulnerability, let luke and leia act like silbings dammit, or two of them i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-22 12:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22216012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/ElsieMcClay
Summary: The Force is Luke and Luke is The Force--but it's in everyone else, too. Everyone's last moments are caught in The Force and played back to Luke in nightmares.
Relationships: Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker & Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Luke Skywalker & Han Solo
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25





	Balance and The Force

**Author's Note:**

> yay for second star wars fics! (the first one posted here, but i'll probably post the other one, too). I saw TRoS yesterday and got absolutely hit across the face with ideas and inspo so here we be, finishing all the fics i started ages ago so i can write those ones lmao
> 
> follow me on tumblr: elsieisntwriting

The Force, as Yoda explained it, was little more than  _ balance.  _ Cold and hot, violence and peace, high and low, and the space between it all— _ balance. _

Perhaps the largest piece of balance in the universe, from the Inner Rim to the Outer and all the worlds and planets in between, was death and life and the moments between both. The final moments of everyone’s lives lingered in The Force, caught in time forever and encased in the energy around everyone and everything on every planet as far as Luke knew. 

And he saw them, every last moment of every life; and, Gods, there were a lot of them. This was  _ war _ , after all. 

Padmé screamed, mouth open wide and face red and eyes scrunched closed, and a med-droid tended to her. Obi-Wan watched over her, his hand in hers and his eyes sadder than Luke had ever seen them, and Luke did not remember his mother but knew this was her, knew it in the way The Force whispered it to him. He must have known it before The Force, before  _ Ben  _ Kenobi. 

Over and over, he saw her die. Because of him, because of Leia, because of Anakin and Vader, because she could not go on without him. He saw her die. 

It began with her every night and moved through the universe. 

The Force never saw armour, and Luke stood on a battlefield around a hundred men and women dressed in flight suits with invisible blasters cradled in their arms. The sky on every planet was dark and endless, starless like a black hole above him. He saw the soldiers (Resistance and Order ‘troopers alike) crumble, saw the way others’ blasters carved holes in them in ways he could never see around the smoke rising from white armour. He saw their faces; he saw their tears and the fear in their eyes. 

They were scared, and Padmé screamed, and Luke woke with a gasp. He cried for them, sobbed for them, into his fist so as not to make too much noise. His hands shook. He laid back on his sweat-chilled pillow and forced himself into some sort of unconsciousness that really didn’t count as  _ sleep _ and was too loud to be meditation.

But on the bad nights, the really bad nights, he saw the moments that had not happened yet. Han and Leia and others, others he hardly knew or didn’t know at all. 

These dreams began in the dark. A high bridge above an abyss and Han died. He died, and his hair was gray already, and Luke didn’t recognize who the lightsaber through his middle belonged to. He saw the  _ hurt  _ and the  _ betrayal  _ in Han’s eyes, and he reached out but The Force took him away in a hurry. Han tipped over the edge of the bridge and fell, and Luke called out. 

Leia died, too, in his dreams, and he tried not to remember how because The Force turned a little darker in his head if he remembered how she died when he woke. ( _ Ben, Ben,  _ who the Hell was Ben, did he kill her? Did he kill Han?) 

And he saw the faces of Rogue One, a team he had never met but had always heard so much about. Heroes. Dead ones, and he was the only living man who knew what they looked like when they died. A girl clutching a man on a beach, both of them too young to die there, and two others in the middle of the crossfire. He saw everyone on Scarif die in a flash of light, and it hurt all over, and he woke up crying and sore. His hands trembled, and sleep evaded him for fear of the dreams—the memories of The Force and therefore his memories because he  _ was  _ The Force. 

He woke one night (he remembered Leia’s gasp for  _ Ben,  _ a plea in the dark and then a breath and nothing and he remembered) and stumbled from his cot, narrowly dodging the lip of the wall above his bunk. Chewie slept soundly beneath him, his knees drawn half to his chest to cram the rest of his body into the bed, and R2 sat, dormant and dark, in the corner as he charged. For once, 3PO said nothing. 

Luke kept a hand on the wall to keep himself steady through his blurry vision, weaving through the labyrinth of halls in the  _ Millenium Falcon _ . He had never felt so old, so achy and wise, but scared at the same time. His uncle used to tell him adults were never scared, and he believed him until now, twenty-something-years-old and terrified out of his wits.

He found Leia and Han in the cockpit, alone and sitting in silence with a small radio on the dashboard, something a local from some planet gave to Leia. The radio hummed with an alien language, and space spread out before them, broken only by the stars and distant planets and the  _ Falcon  _ itself. Han glanced over at Leia and took her hand in his, a soft smile on his face and a mirroring expression on hers, and they were  _ okay  _ and breathing and alive _.  _

The serene image shattered at Luke’s entrance. His legs gave out from under him, knees buckling under the weight of the dreams. Padmé’s screams echoed in the back of his mind, still, agonized and lonely. Leia gasped, and two pairs of hands rolled him over on the ground, and he couldn’t breathe. 

“Luke?” asked Leia, and he drew his knees closer to his chest and fumbled to take her hand in his. Her brows were drawn together, face hovering a foot above his, and her and Han shared a look over him. 

“You die,” he told her between heaving gasps, “in my dreams, I see you die.” 

“Who? Leia?” Luke shook his head against Han’s knee. 

“ _ Everyone. _ ” He cried a little harder at that until Leia took him up in her arms and held him like only a sister can. Han inserted himself on Luke’s other side, and they huddled there on the floor, his shoulders shaking and digging into Han’s sternum, no doubt, and his legs stretched out uncomfortably before him. 

“You can’t die,” he begged, though The Force told him how useless it was to ask. “Please, you can’t die.” 

“We aren’t planning on it, kid.” Leia ran a hand over his hair, and Han’s words vibrated through him. Luke tightened his grip on both of their arms. 


End file.
